What Are People For?

A Conversation with Michael Sacasas

L. Michael Sacasas is the Executive Director of the Christian Study Center and author of the The Convivial Society, a popular newsletter on technology, culture, and the moral life. Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis sat down with Michael to discuss the meaning of technology, why limits are good for us, and how to stay human in a dehumanizing age.

How did you come to be interested in questions of technology?

The journey has a fairly straightforward starting point. While I was studying theology as a graduate student, I read sociologist Craig Gay’s Way of the Modern World, whose premise is that many Christians tend to profess faith but live as if they were practical atheists. That is to say, their faith doesn’t substantially impact the contours of their everyday life. In analyzing why that is, he examined the economic, political, cultural, and scientific technological structures that shape our habits and our assumptions in such a way that we end up living our lives counter to our expressed beliefs. 

So the book caught my attention, and a particular chapter on science and technology introduced me to people like Lewis Mumford and Hannah Arendt, to Martin Heidegger’s work on technology, and to Jacques Ellul. And I began to think that technology is not just this thing we have around us that we use to accomplish banal, mundane tasks, or even to achieve great remarkable things like putting a man on the moon. Instead, technology is morally consequential, and its use has unnoted ramifications for how we seek to live our lives, for the kinds of communities we want to build. 

At one point I began writing a blog called The Frailest Thing. I took that title from one of Pascal’s pensees. “Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.” And I also published in The New Atlantis after the editor, Ari Schulman, reached out to me. The New Atlantis is such a wonderful publication that has shaped my own thinking for many years. The blog eventually became a newsletter, The Convivial Society. The newsletter isn’t my day job, as I am currently the executive director of the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, Florida. It’s a wonderful institution, loosely affiliated with about thirty to forty similar centers around the country. We try to cultivate a thoughtfulness informed by the Christian tradition about shared human questions, a regard for the intellectual resources within the Christian tradition, and to bear witness to that tradition in the university context.

I would say the root of my concern with technology is just simply a desire to know how we ought to live. What amounts to a good life and how does technology shape our ability to achieve, to some degree, the ideals we have for ourselves and for our communities? 

The title of your newsletter is The Convivial Society. I love that word, convivial—it gestures towards relationality. In Mormon theology, the unit of salvation is a bit less individual than in Protestantism but extends to family and wider social relations. Joseph Smith, for example, was more city builder than single soul rescuer. He was forming a people and trying to build cities according to visions of utopia, of Zion. Could you talk a little bit about why you used the word conviviality and the ways in which technology, the good life, and community interact?

Definitely. The word conviviality is very closely linked, for me, to the work of Ivan Illich, a twentieth-century polymath. He was a historian and a social critic. In 1973, Illich wrote a book called Tools for Conviviality. I initially thought of my newsletter’s title as a sort of homage to Illich’s work, and then also to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society. Both thinkers have been very important to me.

By the word conviviality Illich was not talking about a bit of tipsiness at social gatherings; he used it specifically to oppose what he thought of as industrial society. It certainly has a communal dimension to it, and he was trying to describe and define the convivial society as an antidote or set of counter-practices to industrial society or a society shaped by industrial tools, by which he meant both technology and institutions, notably the school and the hospital, but also transportation, etc. Illich was trying to gather around that word—conviviality—an opposition to what he saw as the deficiencies and depredations of industrial society.

Convivial tools operate at a human scale, and so a convivial society is one that is conducive to human flourishing on human terms. It operates at a scale and a pace that is hospitable to us as embodied human beings, that wouldn’t dehumanize us by running counter to the conditions necessary for our flourishing. Conviviality entails both community and personal proficiency.

Illich saw that the industrial era was de-skilling individuals. Industrial society makes individuals dependent on goods and services they cannot produce for themselves. And costs come with that, psychic costs, where we are unable to feel secure and competent in the world; social costs, where communities now outsource the fulfillment of needs to corporations or governmental services and agencies in ways that lift the burden of mutual care from the community to these industrial-scale institutions, where the individual gets lost and becomes a functionary, a number in a bureaucratic ledger. 

A convivial society, instead, has a sense of independence: a convivial tool is one that anyone could take up and learn how to use and master. To borrow Thoreau’s term, the tool won’t cause the user to become a tool of the tool. For Illich, that kind of autonomy and self-sufficiency always then served the community. We would have robust family units and small-scale communities and institutions in the service of interdependence. These would be the proper sites of human flourishing, sites that would empower individuals and users in their orbits rather than make them merely dependents of the services they would produce. Conviviality thus gathers much of Illich’s thinking. It’s not just a critique, but also a positive alternative vision for what has been lost and what ought to be cultivated.

I also think of conviviality as a spirit that one brings to life: seeking to build bridges, to be hospitable, and to welcome the stranger. Whenever he gathered with friends, Illich had this practice of lighting a candle that was supposed to symbolize, in one sense, the presence of the stranger who may come and join. In other words, we’re always open to that surprise of a stranger’s arrival. But in another sense, that stranger is also Christ, who is gathering with his people. 

I think the very first difficulty of thinking differently about technology is defining what we mean by the word “technology.” Before encountering your work, I probably would have defined technology as applied science or tools that help us achieve certain goals and, maybe more broadly, as symbols of progress. After your many years of reflection, could you share your own working definition of technology?

One of the things I found early on while writing publicly about technology was the difficulty of defining it well. And I’m afraid I don’t end up with a very simple definition.

Typically, we think of words that are constructed like technology—biology, geology, theology, etc.—and we usually give them a standard definition, which is the study of whatever the prefix happens to be: biology is the study of life, geology the study of the earth, theology the study of God, and so on. The idea of “techn-ology” as a study of techne (Greek for “art” or “craft”), or the study of human making, that actually was the way in which the word was used, though rarely, as late as the nineteenth century. For example, when we think of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s in that sense of “the study of techne” that the school was named in the mid-1800s. 

But that doesn’t quite work for technology in the way we commonly use it today. We use technology to refer not to the study of anything, but to an amazingly varied assortment of things. When I speak to groups on these topics, I’ll look around whatever room I’m in and ask, “What is technology in this room?” For example, I’m holding a pen and I’m writing on a piece of paper, both of which count as technologies. We tend to think of it first as our tools. But when we push beyond the question of tools, when we ask how did this pen and paper get to me, then we imagine a whole machinery behind the mass production of pens, the creation of ink, the manufacturing of paper. We think of the industry that turns trees into stuff we hold in our hands. 

In that sense technology becomes a very unhelpful term: it includes too much, and by doing so it veils. It becomes impossible to ask, Are you pro-technology or anti-technology? The question is senseless. You can’t make it mean anything because it is impossible to declare yourself either for or against technology without reservation. 

So what we need to do is look at specific technologies and systems at a more granular level. We need to examine how they operate and what they require of us, what they allow us to do, how they change our relationships with our communities, and what kind of self they generate when we’re thinking about our engagement with media technology through which we express ourselves and receive information about the world. From there emerge all sorts of questions we can then ask. But technology, that word itself, often gets us into trouble or leads us down the wrong path. 

Consider the railroad. We could just look at it as a technological artifact. But of course it’s composed of countless other parts, and it would be inadequate to stop there. The railroad car could not function unless a system of tracks were created. That rail system then necessitated not just further artifacts but a systemization of society. We created time zones in order to make train travel coordinated and safe. Time zones then systematize the human experience of time in the United States. Social consequences! Consider also the automobile and its effects in creating urban and suburban communities, all of the social ramifications resulting from the systems necessary to sustain the given artifacts. Throughout the nineteenth century, these systems became more elaborate and more complex. 

It’s that line from Heidegger: “The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” If you’re just looking at the tools, the artifacts, or even the systems, you end up missing that there’s also a way of looking at the world through the lens of the technological. You see the world as a space of problems to be solved through the application of technical means. An example that drove this home for me several years ago was Noah Yuval Harari talking about a trend in the way we think about death. This universal human experience that has been the subject of such profound moral, cultural, artistic, and theological reflection, that has been central to the human understanding of what it means to be a human being across cultures, simply gets reduced to an engineering problem. According to that view, if we just begin to look at death as an engineering problem, we may solve it. That’s a radically different way of experiencing and intersecting with the world around us. 

When you continue to dig and ask questions regarding the moral ramifications of technology, you end up inevitably coming to this question of what are people for, which is a question from Wendell Berry. Only when you ask that question do you have a position from which to think critically about technology. What are people for? What is the good life? What is the just society? And then think about how technology abets or hampers our pursuit of the responses to those questions.

Berry has a wonderful line in one of his Sabbath poems, that we live the given life and not the planned. It’s the idea of receiving the world and creation as a gift. That is in jeopardy when we begin to adopt a technological way of thinking about the world. The world then becomes a field for mastery, for the application of our will. And we lose sight of it as a gift that, at least to some degree, ought to be received with gratitude.

Heidegger, famously, had the idea of thrownness, so distinct from the idea of creation as a gift. Thrownness is so violent, you’re just tossed down on this rock, and the trauma immediately puts you into a scarcity mindset where you have to think about how to compete and survive. Whereas your view (and Berry’s) is that it’s a gift to come down and be conscious and receive these wonders to explore. It’s a very different framing.

Right, exactly. Receiving the world with gratitude is an important aspect of that way of being in the world. It doesn’t mean that we can’t act in the world or on the world, but that we bring a different set of values into our relationship with the world and one another. We may see it less as a matter of manipulating the world towards our own ends and more a matter of also receiving and caring and learning from the world around us. That’s a long way of talking about what technology is. But we have to consider every one of those levels of how technology becomes a part of our lives, how it interacts with our own aspirations of who we want to be.

One of the most popular things you have written was a set of forty-one questions that people can ask themselves about the technologies that they’re using. You wanted to show that whether technology is good or bad depends on a number of factors, including how you interact with it. 

Many Americans, religious people especially, feel extremely anxious about technology. Ideas and patterns and invitations can come through smartphones that seem to present harm to the community, to people’s children or partners. Though this isn’t new, there’s heightened anxiety about the role of the internet, and many don’t feel in control. 

These questions are very helpful because they remind you that you are in control or that you at least have more control than you think you do. But who can ask forty-one questions of themselves every time they try a different device? So rather than necessarily going through all forty-one questions, what is the pattern of thought or heuristic that you’re trying to encourage people to use as they encounter these new things in the world?

The first thing the questions all presume is that technologies are not neutral. We have not thought more deeply about technology in part because we have assumed that technology is inherently neutral and what matters is what we do with it. In other words, the use to which humans put technology is where all the moral value rests. Our second assumption is that technology as a whole is a largely beneficent force in human history. So the questions first seek to disrupt those assumptions.

One way of thinking about this first idea—that technology is not neutral—is the old expression that to the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That expression neatly captures a kind of phenomenological approach to technology: when a tool comes into the circuit of mind, body, and world, it changes our perception of the world. This is not to suggest that anybody who takes a hammer is going to go around hitting everything around them. It can be more subtle. But it does suggest that your intentions are directed in some way when you take that tool in hand. To use the hammer, you recognize that even its shape, its weightedness on one end, the way it fits in your hand— it encourages you to see everything around you as something that you could hit, even if you’re not necessarily going to hit it.

Consider what happened when we began carrying cameras around with us all the time: every interaction, everything you see, every walk you take, the world subtly shifts, and all of these things become things that could be photographed and documented, regardless of what we’re seeing or doing. Then link that shift in perspective to Instagram or Facebook. It changes the character of our experience. Even if you never take the picture, as you’re walking you may think, “Oh, that would be a nice shot to post on Instagram.” You didn’t do a bad thing or a good thing. You may not even have done anything at all with the tool. But the tool itself, its presence—its way of mediating our experience which is going to raise questions, present possibilities, some might say create temptations. 

The underlying heuristic of the questions is simply to become thoughtful. To recognize that when we pick up these tools, in one way or another, they’re shaping our experience of the world, our relationships, and our self. You can look at those questions as iterating the same questions for those three groups: self, community, and nature or creation or the world. We should think about how the tool affects us at those three levels. You don’t have to learn the 41 questions. I could have written 141 questions. The point was simply to generate thoughtfulness towards the tools. Whatever insights I may have had about technology, I derived most of them simply by paying attention to myself, by being very introspective about how a certain tool was working on me, how it was shaping me, what compulsions it might be creating in me, how it encouraged me to act or not to act. If we take the time to think reflectively about our own experience, we may find that we can all be pretty good tech critics in the sense that we become attuned to the ways in which these technologies in general shape our lives and the character of our relationships, and so forth. 

I would mention one other thing, and that is that the body has become a very important point of analysis. We are embodied creatures, and one of the theological pillars I bring to my thinking about technology is that the body is good and its limitations are good. If we think about how technologies may encourage us to disregard the body, to be thoughtless about the body, maybe to even hold the body in scorn, or how technology may displace the body as a focal point of human experience—we begin to think about that circuit of self, community, world, and how, when you interject the tool into that circuit, it begins to shape the working of the whole. 

I want to hear more about how your theological or religious commitments have influenced your thinking about these questions. It seems to me that perhaps the most important theological inheritance from Christianity that can inform current debates is the incarnation: that the material world and our material bodies are good and worthy and should not be seen as problems to escape or to re-engineer. 

When I consider the theologically informed principles that form the foundation of my thinking, I think of the goodness of creation. That has ramifications for how we think of ourselves as human beings and for how we relate to nature. Theologically, we would speak of nature as creation. What is our responsibility or obligation towards the created world? 

Modernity has given us a pretty strict separation between the human and the non-human. But theologically I see us as part of a created order, distinct in some ways but also as members of a community that includes not just humans, but the land and other creatures and elements that share the world. We must think about how technology impacts our relationship to the created world. In doing so, we must remember creation’s fundamental goodness. And a key part of that goodness is its embodiedness. 

Whether I think of the declaration of the goodness of the embodied human being at creation in Genesis or the incarnation or the resurrection of the body—these key doctrines that inform the Christian understanding—they all affirm the value of the embodied human condition. And as you put it, that it is not something we should seek to re-engineer or to escape. 

So often in the story of technology in the modern West, even from the outset, there was this desire to alleviate the human estate. Francis Bacon puts in terms of ameliorating the effects of the Fall. But that very quickly changed to a goal of transcending the human condition. In my view, we should instead recognize that the limits entailed in our humanity don’t necessarily exist to be transcended, but that they’re conducive to our flourishing. We should think about the idea that creation is gratuitous, that it is a gift, and what that means for how we relate to the world, how the tools we use encourage us to receive the world as a gift, or discourage that posture. Different ramifications spill out from there. 

A lot of angst about smartphones, for example, stems from what I think of as distraction discourse or attention discourse. That discourse focuses on the negative, this sense that we’re losing our capacity to focus. But the discourse rarely gives place to the goods towards which our attention ought to be directed. Part of a religious perspective is to have a clear sense of what those goods are and why we ought to be, at least in some ways, curbing our use of technology. Not because we’re anxious or reactionary, but because we want to pursue a certain set of goods. When tools impede that pursuit, we should recognize that those tools ought to be relegated to their proper place so that we can free ourselves to pursue those goods.

Hope also plays an important part in this. Theologically, our hope is ultimately not in our own resources. That keeps certain theologically informed technology thinkers from giving ourselves up to the idea that that technology will be our savior, that if we just find the right technological fix then things are all going to be well. 

You said one thing that I think goes against deep American optimism, which is that limits can help us flourish. Christians in general believe in adhering to God’s law, not because God merely wants us to be obedient or because He loves to exert control, but because those laws ultimately lead to a greater freedom in a more abundant life. Is that what you have in mind when you see limits as being conducive to our ultimate joy?

Part of the image that comes to mind when I think about this is a passage in an essay by Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics (Hell hath no limits).” He has a wonderful, very articulate paragraph in which he talks about how a small plot of land, when cared for, can actually yield indefinitely. It has this capacity to be continuously renewed and to give its fruit. On the one hand there’s this sense that I don’t just need more and more and more to live the good life; the good life is not just a matter of endless accumulation. Instead, it recognizes that limited things, or limited scale, cared for and attended to properly can be rewarding and can be a source of satisfaction and joy. It goes against the grain of a decidedly consumerist American culture. Indeed, if the ways we are shaped by our consumer technologies have an overall pattern, it is simply to cultivate in us the presumption that the good life is the life that one can purchase or consume. Instead of this ideal of endless consumption, we can recognize a better path to joy and happiness, and a sense of satisfaction and purpose in this life. Law, certainly in a sense of moral prohibition, is properly understood as a way of channeling us towards the good rather than simply arbitrary limitations. 

One other way in which limits go against the grain of some strains of American culture is in recognition of our obligation to one another, our interdependence. For example, the choice to stay in a community to care for your aging parents instead of moving to an exciting new city. That could be a case where you might embrace the limits of your obligations to your family and consume less exciting resources and opportunities. But those very limits may also point towards a greater fulfillment or a greater sense of one’s harmony with life itself. At its best, religion is a school of love. One of my favorite things about Latter-day Saint life, and one relatively unique to us I think, is that you can’t really choose which congregation you go to. You go to the one in your geographic area. You can’t shop around to find one that’s a closer match to your preferred race or income or political affiliation, which means you have to learn to love people that you would otherwise not choose to. In this way, we find that through the limiting of our choices, we grow into beings that we most aspire to be.  

That’s an excellent example. 

As a final question, do you find any other resources within the Christian tradition or within the story of Jesus that might inform how we can have a healthier relationship to the human-built world or that could help us deepen our relationship with God and one another?

There could be many answers to that question, but the one that comes readily to mind is how parents think about technology in their children’s lives—I encourage readers and listeners not to think primarily about limitations but to think about the virtues that they want to aspire to, something to focus on. This is not just a matter of being positive. There is some good whose beauty is drawing us toward itself and that we value, that we long for. And because we want to pursue that good, we want to mitigate the ways in which we might be hampered from pursuing it. 

The life of Christ provides us with an example to be followed. 

Lately I have been reflecting on Jesus’s lack of hurry in the gospels. It’s striking. In fact, at the one point where he is being pushed to hurry, when his friend Lazarus is ill, he decidedly refuses to hurry in a way that frustrates all of those around him. 

I think about the frenetic pace of our lives, about the way in which we always feel ourselves fighting for time (or just fighting time), not even able to abide moments of stillness. We should reflect deeply upon what is giving shape to the temporal structures of our lives such that we are kept from modeling the example of Christ in this very specific way. There is the felt experience of time when we are with those who need our care, who need our attention. One of the costs of the perpetual state of hurriedness, the frenetic standstill, is that we may find ourselves impatient with our children, impatient with our neighbors, impatient with those that need something of us, impatient maybe even with ourselves. We should think about how we might better structure our lives, including the tools we use to structure that experience, so that we might better approximate being at peace with time. 

One of the most difficult things Jesus has commanded us is to turn the other cheek; that runs very much counter to the grain. But perhaps more difficult in these times is His command to take no thought for tomorrow, that we lay aside the imperative to control and to manage and to fine-tune every aspect of our lives and bring it all within our control. We have many tools to do that, to manage and control and master our experience in the future rather than creating an openness, a hopeful openness to surprise. Indeed, Illich’s term for grace is an openness to the surprise that may come, and a lack of anxiety. The more we are bent on controlling, the more anxious we become. That calmness of spirit that Christ models for us is also a product of a complete dependence upon the Father’s good gifts. That disposition runs very much counter to how our technological infrastructure is marketed to us as tools to control the world and bring about what we want in it.

Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of Faith Matters and the Editor of Wayfare.

Art by Joseph Chu.